A Possible Explanation

Why would the CIA in violation of US law and their own charter want to “investigate” Hubbard?

Probably you’d have to ask the Agency through an FOIA request.

Doubtfully they’d be too forthcoming.

A search through CIA’s FOIA reading room nets zero results on L Ron Hubbard.

It seems that after more than a half a century they are still not willing to put on public display what is in File no 156409.

What would cause them to take an interest in Hubbard?

Is it possible that Hubbard stepped on a few stealthy toes when he published Science of Survival in 1951?

In it he writes about what he calls Pain-Drug-Hypnosis:

” There is another form of hypnotism which falls between the surgical operation and straight hypnotism without physical pain. This form of hypnotism has been a carefully guarded secret of certain military and intelligence organizations. It is a vicious war weapon and may be of considerable more use in conquering a society than the atom bomb. This is no exaggeration. The extensiveness of the use of this form of hypnotism in espionage work is so wide today that it is long past the time when people should have become alarmed about it….

” Pain-drug-hypnosis is simply an extension of narcosynthesis, the drug hypnosis used in America only during and since World War II.

” Hypnotism has the virtue, at first at least, of requiring the consent of the hypnotic subject before the hypnotism is done. Further, hypnotism has an additional virtue over drug hypnosis and over pain-drug-hypnosis in that an individual in a hypnotic trance will rarely perform an immoral act, even though commanded to do so by the hypnotist, unless that individual would normally perform such acts.

” Drug hypnotism does not have to be done with the individual’s consent. An individual who is drugged can receive and will obey hypnotic commands given to him by the doctor or operator and will continue to obey these commands after waking from the drugged sleep. By using the method of dropping a heavy sedative such as chloral hydrate into an individual’s drink, by suddenly muzzling him with a silk scarf from behind and injecting morphine into his arm, or by discovering the individual when he is drunk or shortly after he has been operated upon or during an operation or during the administration of electric shock or sedation in an insane asylum, drug hypnosis can be induced. Thereafter, the operator works much as in ordinary hypnotism. Drug hypnosis can be administered with such wording that the patient will not only forget what he has been told and yet perform it, but will also forget that he has ever been given drug hypnosis if that command is included. And he may even be given data to account for the time during which he was given narcosynthesis. Drug hypnotism, then, can be done without the consent of the subject and is commonly so done even by doctors in the normal course of practice. There is nothing new or strange about drug hypnosis. It occasionally fails to work as the operator intends and it does not usually strike against the individual’s normal moral tone, … It has been discovered that a drugged individual when beaten and given orders would almost invariably obey these orders, regardless of the degree to which they flouted his moral tone or his position or his best interests in life.

“… An individual might be given pain-drug-hypnosis on Tuesday night and wake up Wednesday morning without any knowledge of the fact that he had been slugged when he stepped out of his car, given an injection, painfully beaten (but not so as to leave any marks) and put quietly into his own bed. This individual does not know that anything unusual has occurred to him nor will he suspect it, even when he is confronted with the fact that his conduct is extremely changed along certain lines from former conduct. …
” The Foundation undertook some tests with regard to the effectiveness of pain-drug-hypnosis and found it so appallingly destructive to the personality and so unfailing in its action, …”

This was two decades before John Marks seminal book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate and the Church Committee revealed the existence of CIA’s most notorious and very secret program Mk Ultra.

How did Hubbard know about all of this?

Decades before it was released to the general public.

That we will cover in the next installment.